101 Mystery Stories

54 One Will Too Many Joe L. Hensley

Mark Wilhelm was what has come to be known within the legal profession as an “office lawyer.” He had little ability for the fiery displays that help make the personality of a good courtroom tactician. He considered his mind to be too calculating and orderly for feigned heat and loud oratory. He was fairly adept at intricacies, at detail work, and so he existed well on settling estates, on minor tax work, and on abstracting titles to real estate.

He had certain abilities, certain faults. Among the former was his rather distinguished looks when he was dressed in his fine, dark clothes. Those looks made it possible for him to hold closely the attention of a widow when one visited his office, making each female client think that he regarded her as a more-than-friend. And, if sometimes the taste in his mouth was sour, still it was a living.

His practice was centered in a large Midwestern town. He liked the town, but it grew cold there in the winter. Very cold. Mark Wilhelm hated cold. He liked to spend those cold months in Florida, but vacation this year had been delayed by lack of funds and other reasons.

The most important reason was with him now on long-distance telephone.

“We haven’t seen you. You’ve owed us more than forty thousand for almost a year,” said the smooth voice that brought remembrance of daiquiris and suntans and horses that ran fast, but not fast enough. “When can we expect to get it? I rather dislike making these calls and I don’t intend to call you again.”

Mark’s hands were wet and slippery as he held the phone.

“You know very well that gambling debts aren’t legally collectible,” he said weakly.

“Maybe they aren’t in your business, but I’d hate to think they weren’t in mine,” the voice said, small slivers of steel beginning to show.

“Are you threatening me?” Mark asked, trying to raise the temperature of his voice with small success.

“Of course,” the voice said. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

Mark started to hang up the telephone and got it all of an inch from his ear when resolve faded and fear came on. “I’ve got to have some time to raise that kind of money.”

“I’ll give you thirty days. If you don’t have it then, I believe I’ll assume you’re never going to have it and proceed accordingly. One of my associates will call thirty days from today. Have the money ready for him.”

Mark hung up the phone carefully and sat at his oversize desk thinking. He did not dislike himself for his compulsion to gamble. When you spent your working days around an office trying to make old women happy so you could write their wills and settle their estates when they died, a man deserved some bright lights and excitement when vacationing in Florida.

But last year he’d really gone off the deep end. Forty thousand dollars—

The opportunity offered itself the very next day. Mrs. Belle Rivera, a widow with cold, clutching hands, who had more money than the rest of Mark’s menage together, died. And the nice part was that he didn’t even have to help her along, as he’d done once or twice with other clients. Not really murder them, of course. Just leave a bottle of sleeping pills close when they were in pain, or that one time when he’d stolen Mrs. Jaymon’s heart medicine.

Mrs. Rivera, Mark remembered well, was an eccentric lady with no close relatives who had doted strongly on Mark. He, in turn, had held her hand and his breath and waxed eloquent for her for years. And she’d trusted him.

Mark’s main fault was that he was dishonest. It was a compelling dishonesty that would seldom allow him to complete a transaction without getting something that was not his.

In Mrs. Rivera’s estate the fee for settlement, he computed, would be almost enough to pay his gambling debt, but it would leave nothing for another trip to Florida. The weather was growing cold and he longed for the warmth of the southern sun. Besides, he wouldn’t be able to draw against the attorney’s fee for at least six months. The probate commissioner was very strict about that. Also he owed the bank a great deal of money, and they’d move in on the major part of the fee.

He sat in his office thinking for a long time. Finally the idea came.

First of all he called her bank and his, the one that he usually worked with, and asked to speak to John Sims.

“Mrs. Rivera died this morning,” he said to Sims. “Terrible loss. I’ve her will here in my office. She named your bank as executor and myself as attorney. I trust that’s satisfactory?”

Sims happily assured him that the bank would be most willing to work with him in the matter.

“I’ll probate her will this afternoon,” Mark told him. “There were two copies and I’ve retained both of them here in my office.”

“That’s unusual,” Sims said.

“She trusted me implicitly,” Mark said, putting a little ice in his voice. “She felt her will would be safer in my office than at her home. As you may know, she had become increasingly deaf and her sight was poor, and she was afraid that her servants might try to pry into her affairs.”

“I see,” Sims said, his voice satisfied.

Mark hung up the phone with relief, that part accomplished. What he’d said was perfectly true. Mrs. Rivera had left both copies of her will in his office. Now to change that will. But first he would have to contact his old associate, Alvin Light.

Alvin would be perfect for the idea he had in mind.

He told his idiot office girl he’d be out the rest of the morning and left.

The office girl had been chosen for two reasons. She was ugly and made none of his old lady friends jealous. Secondly, she was stupid and never noticed any of Mark’s mistakes.

He found Alvin in a third-class bar doing what he was best at since he’d been disbarred — drinking. Outside the bar, though, before he went in, he watched with interest as an ambulance pulled up and loaded an old bum who lay tattered and supine in the gutter. None of the other bums paid much attention.

Mark heard one ambulance attendant grumble to the other: “Dead. This cold weather really gets to them.”

The scene caught at something in his mind, an addition to the original idea. He stood thinking for a moment, then went into the bar. Alvin was holding drunken court in the back of the bar, but he shooed the bums away when Mark appeared.

Before Alvin’s downfall for bribing a member of a petit jury and getting caught at it, the two had sliced up many a client between them. And even though Alvin was now a vile-smelling alcoholic, intelligence still showed dimly in his eyes.

Mark got him away from the bar and into the car.

“How’d you like to make fifty thousand dollars?” he asked.

Alvin’s red eyes flickered. “I’d like it. Not for me so much. I’m smart enough to know what I am. But I’d like it for my boy. He hates my guts, but he’s still my son. He’s in medical school now, in California. He’s married with a couple of kids I’ve never seen. He hasn’t got any money, and he’s going to have to drop out of school and go to work when this year is over. Enough money would see him through; the rest should buy me enough whiskey to finish killing me.”

He looked up at Mark sharply. “What have you got going, Mark? I have to admire you, you know. I was a crook because I thought it was smart. You’re dishonest because you’re completely amoral — everything revolves around you.” He sighed. “You’ve been luckier than I — a long time being caught.”

Mark ignored the comment and went to the point, “You used to do Mrs. Rivera’s work, didn’t you?”

Alvin nodded. “She was a client of mine before you came along with your phony charm.”

“She died,” Mark said softly. “What if there was a bequest for a hundred thousand dollars to you in her will?”

“You mean there is one?”

“Not yet,” Mark said, smiling. “But I have all copies of the will in my office and no one has seen them but me.”

“I get fifty?”

“Same way we always went. Fifty-fifty.” It was easy to say it. But there would be no split.

“How about witnesses to the will?”

“I was one. The other was my office girl. I didn’t pick her for her brains. She’s so dumb she has trouble remembering her own name. Besides, I typed the will and all she ever saw was the last page.”

Alvin eyed him shrewdly and nodded. “Fifty thousand dollars is more than I’ll ever need. Why so much for me? I might have gone for less.”

“We’ve always gotten along at the even split,” Mark said smoothly.

Alvin smiled. “Don’t try to cross me on this, Mark. I need that money for my boy.”

The rest was easy.

All he had to do was carefully take the staples out of the will, align the paper and insert, at the bottom of a page, among Mrs. Rivera’s long list of specific bequests, a hundred-thousand-dollar one to Alvin Light, for “his past services to me and his present necessity.” He would have preferred leaving it to himself, but that would be illegal, since he had drawn up and witnessed the will.

Then he probated the will.

The next four weeks went very smoothly. Mark lost himself in the intricacies of Mrs. Rivera’s various problems. Final state and federal returns, inheritance tax schedules, waivers, inventories — nice detail work of the type in which he excelled.

Because Mrs. Rivera had died with a great deal of money and no close relatives, none of her heirs questioned her bequests. There was plenty for all. John Sims, probate officer at the bank, raised an eyebrow at Mark when he read the bequest to Alvin Light, but Mark pretended not to notice.

And so on the beautiful, but now very cold twenty-ninth day after Mark’s long-distance telephone call, Alvin, armed with a check properly signed by John Sims, cashed that check, while Mark waited outside around the corner. Alvin was gone for a long time, but Mark was patient, if nervous.

When it was done they went back to Mark’s office with a satchel containing a hundred thousand dollars and Mark got out a bottle of very good Bourbon and poured two drinks. He said: “This is the kind of day to be in Florida. Cold!” He shivered. “Drink some of this to warm you.”

Alvin eyed the whiskey and Mark dubiously. “Just the one,” he said.

“Of course,” Mark said, and then watched while the one became two and then ten and conversation moved from old stories to monosyllables.

Everything went as planned. Mark thought of the whole hundred thousand and warm climates. He rationalized by realizing that Alvin couldn’t be trusted. Alvin was an alcoholic and vain and sooner or later an alcoholic would part with any secret. And fifty thousand saved is an enormous saving.

After Alvin was suitably besotted Mark put him in the car, first carefully removing the money in Alvin’s battered briefcase. He put most of this in his safe to pay the emissary of the gamblers and for his own future use. A few bills he kept for further use during the night.

He took Alvin to an even worse neighborhood than the one he’d originally visited the old lawyer in — a neighborhood known for muggings and knifings and doctored whiskey — and, of course, dead bums in the alleys.

Once, on the way, Alvin’s eyes opened a little and Mark heard him whisper: “Don’t cross me — the will—” and some gibberish following that.

Mark smiled and stopped his car in a deserted place and poured more whiskey down the weak old throat. Then he drove on. It was very cold outside and a light snow was falling. The car’s heater could barely compensate. It was the kind of night to be heading south.

He dumped the older man in a little-used alley. This was the difficult and dangerous part, but Mark had been over the neighborhood thoroughly, figuring his chances, knowing they were good. He poured water he’d brought from the office over Alvin’s sodden body, watchfully listening to distant street noises, careful and alert.

Alvin did not move when the water cascaded down. The snow was falling in a near blizzard now and the weather was very cold. He dragged Alvin behind a group of garbage cans and boxes. Twice more, during the night, he came back with more water, but the second trip was unnecessary. Alvin was dead.

Of course, there would be a furor about the hundred thousand dollars, but not the kind that a murder brings. Mark rehearsed his lines in his mind: “I told him to leave it with me or put it in a bank, but he was drunk. After all, he’s been taking care of himself for a long time.”

The hundred thousand could easily have been stolen by one of the toughs in the neighborhood. Mark scattered a few bills he’d kept for that purpose underneath the body and in Alvin’s pockets.

The man from the Miami gambler came at eleven the next day. Mark had purposely let his office girl, “Dumb Dora,” have the morning off.

The man was a nervous little wreck with a tic under his right eye and the face of a fallen saint. Mark smiled and escorted him to the inner office.

“You’ve got the money?” the little man asked.

Mark nodded and opened the safe and began counting it out in neat piles, hurrying, wanting to get this part done quickly.

“Good man,” the nervous one said. “They were sure you weren’t going to be able to come up with it. I’ll have to get to a phone and call a certain number very soon now.”

Mark increased the speed of his counting.

The interruption came then. Mark’s door opened.

John Sims, the bank probate officer, was there. He had one of the uniformed guards with him.

“Sorry to break in, but there wasn’t anyone in the outer office.” Sims nodded apologetically at the little gambler’s emissary. “This is important. They found poor Alvin Light’s body in an alley a little while ago. Poor man had frozen to death.”

Mark nodded, maintaining his composure. “Drinking too damned much.”

Sims looked down at the desk, seeing the neat piles of money, and his face became curious. “I’m carrying out instructions. Alvin left a will with me yesterday when he picked up the money. Named the bank executor and you as attorney. He had me copy down all of the numbers and mark the wrappers of money I gave him yesterday. He stated in the will that if he should die suddenly I should come to you for the money immediately, that you would have it.”

Sims looked down at the desk again and his face went blank. “Why, that looks like some of it there! I recognize the wrappers. You weren’t going to use it, were you?” He picked up the neat bundles and handed them to the guard. “Alvin left the money to his son.”

The nervous little man with the lost eyes sidled out of the office, while Sims and the guard gathered the money from the desk and safe. Mark tried to say something, to think of something.

Nothing came. Nothing at all.

Not that day anyway.